more munchausen

“Why are people attacking all women/feminists in the comments? It’s not like all of the women in the world got together and plotted against the guy. It was the actions of one sadistic, young girl who took advantage of her boyfriend’s mental health issues. Why don’t you all jump on her instead of the entire female population?”

Mathew Taylor said:

“Remember Elliot Rodger? remember when mental health professionals started saying “this guy had a lot of ignored warning signs” like one would expect, but Several feminists said no, this textbook case of Narcissistic Personality Disorder was not about mental health, its because masculinity was toxic?

Yeah, that was ridiculous.

Just like saying feminism and women are to blame for the Carter suicide.

it’s dumb, your right, but its exactly what dudes went through with isla vista, despite the fact he had three times as many male victims as female ones.

Sometimes this kind of thing starts to make us guys wonder if our lives are worthwhile and cared about. When rhetoric and divisive tactics of the current fringe of any ideology (masculinity, not clear mental problems, are why Isla Vista happened was fringe as hell but somehow gained traction) gains traction, all levels of the rhetoric go to butthurt extremes to follow it.

In short, this is the Dude’s Elliot Rodger. The solution is a reasoned response: expect she get the same treatment by the court as if the genders were reversed, and nothing more. Don’t blame women or feminism if she gets off free or with a slap on the wrist non-penalty.

Human beings, however, as we know, are irrational,emotional beings, and that won’t happen, and it’ll be another bullshit wedge used to keep men and women enemies.”

I said:

There’s some truth to what you’re saying, but I also think that Elliot Rodger was a product of our current gender norms. Elliot Rodger was a psychopath and in that way he was atypical. You’re right, it was a mental health issue, not a masculinity issue. But what happens when you drop one of those atypical psychopaths into a situation that men experience which is entirely typical?

Sexual and social invisibility is primarily a male problem, a product of a set of norms that women create and impose. How would an atypical psychopath react to that completely typical male experience? I guess now we know.

Feminists were right in considering the gender dynamic of it, but they drew the wrong conclusions because they at all times refuse to recognize that women are half the culture and that it is women who create the social landscape in which Elliot Rodger’s or any other guy’s masculinity is formed.

The same is true for Michelle Carter. Just as school shootings are a primarily male perpetrated phenomena, munchausen (or whatever you’d like to call this kind of attention whoring), is a primarily female perpetrated phenomena, and even if it is true that Carter, like Rodger, had mental illness, that mental illness is still being experienced within the context of gender norms.

Now what’s interesting is that feminists won’t want to consider the gender dynamic that produced Carter at all. And that’s just like men refusing to consider the gender dynamic of Rodger at all. I think both approaches are disingenuous ways of looking at it which ultimately lead away from the truth.

If we do work out the gender dynamic, what happens, I think, is that we come to a conclusion in both the Rodger and Carter cases that blows the feminist narrative and body of theory apart.